Trump’s outburst about a ‘Christian genocide’ in Nigeria is as dangerous as it is absurd

Two years ago, at a dinner in Washington for Africa “experts” to brief an incoming congressman on the continent, the newly elected legislator began his contribution by declaring that one of Africa’s most urgent crises was a “Christian genocide” in Nigeria. When asked to elaborate, he cited a single name — Nnamdi Kanu — as an example of a persecuted Christian languishing in prison.

The table fell silent when someone gently explained that Kanu was not a pastor or missionary but a Biafran secessionist leader, jailed for fomenting rebellion and inciting violence, not for his faith.

That same combination of ignorance and emotional manipulation resurfaced this weekend when US President Donald Trump erupted on social media, threatening a “fast, vicious and sweet” military invasion of Nigeria to stop a supposed genocide against Christians. The statement was as dangerous as it was absurd.

If Trump had paused to consult the US military, which has spent years partnering quietly with Nigerian forces against Boko Haram and other insurgents, he might have learned that Nigeria’s conflicts are real — but they are not religious wars.

It is astonishing that the United States spends billions of dollars annually on intelligence gathering, yet its political leaders can still be so profoundly misinformed about Africa’s most populous country. Yes, Christians in parts of Nigeria have suffered horrific violence from extremists. But so too have Muslims, often in even greater numbers. In Borno, Yobe and Adamawa — the heart of the Boko Haram insurgency — most victims have been Muslim civilians murdered for rejecting the group’s nihilistic ideology.

Trump’s eruption is the culmination of a yearslong lobbying campaign in Washington by Biafran separatists, who have cleverly repackaged their secessionist grievance as a struggle to save “persecuted Christians”. Since 2019, Biafran groups have declared more than a million dollars on lobbying in Washington, through Mercury Public Affairs, BW Global Group and Daniel Goldin.

They have found a receptive audience among Christian nationalists in the US, who see Nigeria through the prism of their own culture wars. Senator Ted Cruz has floated legislation invoking religious persecution. Congressman Riley Moore has made it a personal crusade. Even the comedian Bill Maher got in on the act, scolding the media for ignoring it.

The strategy is familiar. It echoes the “white genocide” narrative promoted by far-right activists about Afrikaner farmers — a storyline that the Trump administration once enthusiastically adopted before quietly erasing it from the discourse.

As with some Afrikaners, many Nigerian Igbos feel that they are the victims of discrimination, second-class citizens in a country that has never quite healed the wounds of the Biafran civil war of 1967 to 1970.

Emotional triggers

In Washington, the campaign deploys the same emotional triggers: a grain of truth wrapped in distortion, amplified through the machinery of US grievance politics.

That grain of truth begins with the Boko Haram war, launched in 2009 in northeastern Nigeria, which has killed tens of thousands across faith lines. It extends to the Middle Belt, where Muslim and Christian farming communities have clashed violently, and to the recurring conflicts between Fulani herders and largely Christian agriculturalists. These are complex, overlapping crises — rooted in land scarcity, climate stress and state weakness — not a simple religious persecution. Much of the violence is simple banditry and criminality.

To reduce it to “Christian genocide” is not just inaccurate. It’s dangerous.

Nigeria is far from perfect, and its government has often handled these conflicts clumsily or brutally. But it is also a country of extraordinary coexistence: roughly half Christian, half Muslim, and among the world’s most religiously integrated societies. Its current president, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is a Muslim. His wife, Oluremi Tinubu, is a Christian pastor. Nigeria’s Cabinet, parliament and cities are filled with people who cross those supposed lines every day without bloodshed.

The idea that Abuja is colluding in the persecution of Christians is as false as it is incendiary.

If Trump truly cared about Nigerian lives, he might note that the Tinubu government has been fighting, not aiding, the extremists — often with US logistical and intelligence support. The Pentagon, better than anyone, knows that a military intervention in Nigeria would not be swift or clean. It would be catastrophic, plunging West Africa’s fragile equilibrium into chaos at the very moment when Russian forces — now rebranded as the “Africa Corps” — are being pushed back in the Sahelian states, the epicentre of the Jihadist insurgencies.

Stoking religious hysteria from afar risks achieving what Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa could not: turning Nigeria’s diversity into its undoing.

There is a legitimate role for international support in protecting vulnerable communities, helping Nigeria guard its borders, strengthening peacekeeping and deploying sophisticated technology to prevent violence. As Nigerian commentators have pointed out, the international community needs to close ranks in identifying, sanctioning and prosecuting not just the active participants but the financial sponsors and collaborators with those who are responsible.

The world needs partnership, not performative threats of invasion.

It needs steady diplomacy, not social-media outbursts dressed up as moral crusades.

Trump’s outburst exposes more than his ignorance of Africa. It reveals how easily US domestic politics can be weaponised to distort African realities. The real victims of that distortion are not in Washington’s think tanks or on cable news. They are the Nigerians — Muslim and Christian alike — who must live with the consequences. DM

Phillip van Niekerk is the managing partner of Calabar Consulting, a risk consulting company specialising in Africa. The views expressed are his own.